A Look Into Buddhism

As you guys know, I’ve been exploring different religions, and this time around, I will take a look into Buddhism. So, let’s try for a little bit of background on this religion. The founder is Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha. It started around 2,500 years ago in India, and it has approximately 470 million followers making it one of the dominant religions. It was interesting for me to read that Buddhist ideas and philosophies overlap with those of other faiths.

Buddhism Key Beliefs:

They don’t acknowledge a supreme god or deity. Still, their main focus is to achieve the enlightenment of inner peace and wisdom. So, in another afterlife, they’re said to have experienced nirvana.

The Buddha isn’t considered as a God but an extraordinary man. And as a matter of fact, the word Buddha means “enlightened.”

The path to enlightenment is reached by using morality, meditation and wisdom and Buddhists believe that meditation will uncover the truth.

Due to many philosophies and interpretations within this religion, which makes it tolerant and forever evolving.

Some of the followers see Buddhism as a way of living not an organised religion.

Buddhism encourages its people to avoid self-indulgence but also self-denial.

Buddha’s most essential teachings, known as The Four Noble Truths, are critical to understanding the religion.

They believe in karma and reincarnation.

Some of the Buddhism symbols are the lotus flower, the eight-spoked dharma wheel, the Bodhi tree and the swastika (an ancient symbol whose name means “well-being” or “good fortune” in Sanskrit).

Specifically, all Buddhists live by five moral precepts, which prohibit:

Killing living things

Taking what is not given

Sexual misconduct

Lying

Using drugs or alcohol

All that I wrote and learnt came from research so, if you find any mistakes, please let me know, and I’ll fix them.

Although agnostic myself, religion and theology have always been incredibly interesting to me. It is what makes so many people tick and so many people make choices based on their faith. I find the hows and whys incredibly fascinating.

The very trans guy to get phalloplasty eventually became a Buddhist. Wrote some introspective stuff. He was defrocked when they realized he was trans, because he came from a noble family in Ireland. Michael Dillon is his name, Sramanera Jivaka his monk name. Funny thing is, there are sutras where the Buddha allowed us to live in the monasteries with the sex we associated as… 🤷‍♂️